Progress!
What a day! So yesterday, I had found, thanks to the Virtual Racing School service, that the biggest place for me to make up ground was sector 6, which includes turns 6 and 7, leading to the longest straight away on the track. As was once covered in Speed Secrets weekly (also, highly suggest signing up for this – incredibly cheap), there are generally two ways to prioritize which corners or sectors to attack first:
- The corner that leads to the longest straight away. Why? Because any speed lost coming out of that corner, is magnified by the length and amount of time you spend accelerating or at top speed.
- The scariest corner or section of the track. Why? It’s scary. 🙂 If it is scary, than there is a higher probability that most sane people will want to check up and give themselves some room and time to correct for mistakes (and not crash). If you can be less scared or ignore your bodies natural urges to be physically safe and/or alive, you can have an edge! Easy, right?
Sector 6 is not particularly scary and has plenty of run-off AND we’re in the virtual world, so there is less of a fear for life. This is a plain, #1 scenario – it is a long straight away, so don’t screw it up or you’ll pay.
The approach I took
Most of my preparations for this change were mental as I didn’t drive much on Sunday. In fact, we lost track of time in the AM and missed church. 🙁 So I just realized that in my braking for Turn 6, according to the Virtual Racing School data trace, I was using near 100% of the braking force, when I actually needed to brake more like 50% and trail the braking in longer and a similar situation on Turn 7.
So I visualized applying the brake more gently, and holding it longer, anticipating the rear end to come around and being able to get on the throttle. I visualized the same for Turn 7 and long behold – literally, on the very first flying lap, made it work! ON THE VERY FIRST LAP! Unfortunately it was a dirty lap because I dropped a tire elsewhere. iRacing is pretty strict in terms of clean versus dirty laps. Even dropping one tire can have a lap not count or worse, count against you in a race. I’m glad that officials in real world racing aren’t as strict.
A little too excited. Change the setup and carry on.
I’ll admit – I got a little excited and screwed some laps because of how I excited I was at the progress and then realized I hadn’t even changed the setup on the car to the same setup from the reference lap on VRS. So I took a break to collect myself and load the setup. In doing this, I realized I didn’t know how to do this. I was able to easily download the setup file (.sto) but I had no idea how to load it.
Here is a great and simple video I found on how to create, save and load setup files on iRacing. Old but it still works!
Back to progress!
After taking a few breaths to chill out, I got back out on track and proceeded to hammer out a string of 1:21.xxx laps and one point even having a 1:20.8xx lap going. I screwed it up by over-slowing for the chicane but I felt like ‘I got it’ and there’s still room for improvement. My new fastest lap time is 1:21.382, almost one whole second faster than the day prior.
Tomorrow – more of the same.
My goal tomorrow and possibly the next day is to be able to make this new way of driving the norm. I am going to try to do 30 minutes or more of 1:21.xxx lap times. If I can be within .5 seconds of that fastest lap time, consistently – I will feel confident that I’ve adopted these learnings and then can transition to another segment of the track. I love data (and video)!